Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

very atmosphere through which we look, which morally we can do.To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.Or he could advise: “Build your castles in the air. That is where they belong.Now build the foundations under them!”However Thoreau is a man of many and of universal dimensions. Hisstyle can change to the scathing sharpness of a whiplash when he exposesthe unlawfulness of many man-made laws as he does in his Civil Disobedienceand in Slavery in Massachusetts.If a law requires you to be the agent of injustice to another then Isay, break the law.The mass of men serve the state, not as men mainly but as machines,with their bodies. … Such command no more respect thanmen of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worthas horses and dogs. … As they rarely make any moral distinctions,they are as likely to serve the Devil as God.Herman MelvilleIn Melville’s and Whitman’s language one can hear the voice of theocean. In Melville, it is the sea-storms that tossed the whaling ships on whichhe spent some years of his youth. Nowhere else in the English language canone hear such bold cataclysms, such dramatic torrents of language. One canhear it in the sermon spoken by a retired sea captain as he preaches to hisflock of seamen from his pulpit on dry land.As we have seen, God came upon Jonah in the whale and swallowedhim down to living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore himalong into the midst of the seas where the eddying depths suckedhim ten thousand fathoms down and the weeds were wrapped abouthis head, and all the watery world of woe bowled over him.Yet even then, beyond the reach of any plummet—out of thebelly of hell—when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmostbones, even then, God heard the engulfed, repenting prophet whenhe cried.Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering coldand blackness of the sea the whale came breaching up towards thewarm and pleasant sun and all the delights of air and earth; and“vomited out Jonah on the dry land;” when the word of the Lord230